Resistance is Futile: Mainstream Assimilation and Asking Who Can Participate in the Booty?

The photograph above, used for shitty attempts at click baiting  an article on Billboard.com about the singing competition show THE VOICE, displays the three female judges who have been a part of the show at different times. Two of the artists, Shakira and Christina Aguilera, are Latina, yet the show has managed to eerily morph all three of these stars images into what is virtually the same bleach blonde, fair skinned, Northwest European ideal of beauty. Whether it is part of the shows attempts at keeping a brand that requires their female judge to look a certain way, or if it is an image template that has proven to be a successful marketing tool and has been adopted for that reason by each pop star, they have all participated in assimilation toward the “normal” ideals of beauty and perfection. Either way, this assimilated image is not an isolated incident that is reduced to the images produced by THE VOICE, but it is instead a symptom of a larger problem that has faced “crossover” pop stars for as long as they have existed.

A “crossover” star is a label attached to a star who, because of their race specifically, is considered an outsider to mainstream culture. Mary Beltrán discusses this concept of the “crossover” star and its roots in what was dubbed the “Latin Wave” of the 1990s in her book “Latina/o Stars in the U.S. Eyes.” As Latina stars were making their way into American pop culture, they were not seen as being part of mainstream culture the way a white tar was, but rather a niche market that was permeating mainstream culture. The idea of the “Latin Wave” became that these “crossover” stars were accepted as viable moneymakers in mainstream culture, but were still only really marketable to Latina/o people. The alternative to being seen as just for a niche market was assimilating into the mainstream ideals of what sold and what was marketable to “mainstream, or white, audiences. Through assimilation, these crossover stars could break away from being seen as specifically “Latin” stars, and be seen as regular ol’ run of the mill Hollywood stars. However, assimilation meant the star giving up part of the ethnic background that helped define them in order to be accepted as ethnically vague, or some kind of “exotic” white.

The case study provided by Beltrán is a focus on Jennifer Lopez, possibly the biggest and most successful name to come out of the “Latin Wave.” She describes how J. Lo was first embraced as a Latin star, which not only meant focus on her Latina ethnicity in music and Hollywood roles, but also meant that sexual traits like the “booty,” usually emphasized and eroticized to create the “Spicy Latina” or “Spitfire” stereotype, where put directly under the spotlight and used to market Lopez in the mainstream. There was a constant battle between Lopez and the apparent need for assimilation, and a visible public struggle where her re-branding and marketing attempts to hide her Latina ethnic traits and qualities could be measured against her early interviews where she proudly embraced and promoted her Latina-ness. Lopez was compelled to speak about her ethnicity early on, usually taking full advantage of the emphasis on her derrière, but as she became more successful she began to emphasize her Bronx roots, as opposed to Latin roots, and her Hollywood roles became less Latina specific and more ethnically unidentifiable.

If this case study was to be continued, you can see today that the battle between assimilation and holding onto ethnic roots still plagues J. Lo. As evident by her two most recent, and I think highly contradictory music videos, she shows that she still struggles with the need to market herself as a successful commodity, and the need to promote pride in her ethnic roots while also struggling with the need to promote positive body images for women, and use her status to discuss issues of sexual liberation and agency while occupying an ethnic female body.

Lopez’s first video, “I Luh Ya Papi,” uses the title’s language, as well as the inclusion of two backup dancers who have emphasized Latin vernacular in discussion with a white male video director, to overtly display a Latin ethnic background right from the start. The discussion J.Lo and her backup dancers have with the director is attempting to challenge the typical commodification of the Latina body, speaking against objectifying women in videos, and attempting to reverse the roles so that men are objectified and that women are portrayed as the successful “players” with swarms of sexualized men surrounding them. Lopez openly acknowledges here that she recognizes problems with the portrayal of the female body, and is attempting to make a shift away from that. However, in her next video, she seems to succumb to the very objectification she finds so frustrating, and possibly finds it necessary in order to sell the commodity known as J.Lo.

In the video simply titled “Booty,” Lopez brings direct emphasis to, you guessed it, her Booty, as well as the Booty of Iggy Azalea, who is featured in the video with her. There is not any attempt though, to associate the booty with any kind of ethnic origins. Whereas in the 90s J Lo may have used her butt as a point of ethnic pride, now it is reduced to a simple object of lust, up for grabs by any ethnic or racial background. This is especially prevalent given that Lopez created the video with Azalea, who is criticized for putting on the performance of an Ethnic identity in her public appearance. Along with people like Miley Cyrus and Meghan Trainor, Azalea is part of a current Booty-centric wave that seems to consist of white female artists taking pride in that “boom that all the boys chase,” which seen as exclusive to females of color.

There is a long history of white beauty ideals that has placed female bodies of color as exotic and Othered due to focus by white mainstream culture on enlarged breasts, and most importantly butts, which were displayed as gross exotic fascinations for a dominant white culture who’s ideals of beauty were seen as the exact opposite of an ethnic female body. Since first contact with African women, whites have used black female bodies as the undeniable Other, or the polar opposite, of the fair skinned white females with smaller sexual features. White culture used women of color, such as the Hottentot Venus, to create a racist binary of what beautiful looks like, with white bodies being the ideal. The ideas of assimilation and beauty stem from the black and white body binary, where in order to be successful in the mainstream, or at the very least have an opportunity to try, women of color become as close as they can physically to the white ideal which has been force fed down our throats as what beauty looks like, attempting to get rid of the enlarged features of their bodies, that are used to identify black female bodies as an Other.

However, there is a collision happening right now that becomes emphasized by the Jennifer Lopez/Iggy Azalea video. Where females of color, even J. Lo, have seen themselves forced into a position of assimilation, giving up their ethnic features and traits in order to be more “white” and more successful, it seems now the white stars are beginning to appropriate the features that have for so long been seen as ugly, and Other than what it means to be beautiful and successful, in order to in fact become more successful. Trainor’s video is even seen as inspirational for destroying the traditional notions of a beautiful body. However, she’s not singing or talking about all plus size women, she’s singing about women who are plus size in the right places, meaning white women who are now taking pride in large boobs and booty, that have forever been shunned on black females.

I believe this trend is sparking a need to renegotiate who has the right to use female bodies of color in their music videos. Something like Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” video, with whatever problems it may have, is possibly attempting to own the black female body, and the booty, which has seemingly been reduced to a prop to be exploited in the background of Miley Cyrus and Meghan Trainor. Minaj is taking a more aggressive approach of ownership and agency, while Lopez is perhaps opening the doors saying that all females can participate in the Booty. Coming from a background where Lopez had to sacrifice the Ethnic pride that came with her booty, perhaps accepting white artists who wish to use booty to their advantage is a way for Lopez to be able to regain ownership and discussion of her own. The question that arises is that if every female gets to claim ownership of the booty, regardless of ethnic identity, does the booty mean anything anymore, or has it been reduced and commodified into just another mainstream sexual object.

Borg Cube approaching the Enterprse. If you don’t get the reference… Google.

It seems the Booty trend is coming at pop culture like a Borg collective hell bent on assimilating all Booty’s in its path. I see someone like Jennifer Lopez, with a long history of Booty politics, who may see assimilation of the booty into a larger collective where everyone is able to participate as finally being allowed to use her booty as a successful tool, not just as a Latina, but as an artist just like everyone else. For Lopez, there is no longer a need to hide the booty, however assimilation of the booty into mainstream means that any Ethnic background it is tied to is now lost.

On the other hand, Nicki Minaj sees how the booty, with a long and rich history tied specifically to black female bodies, is being manipulated and used for the purpose of mainstream commodification. She is facing the same booty collective that faced J. Lo, telling Minaj that her booty will be assimilated and adapted, or shared by all females to be used in the mainstream, for whatever purpose, with no respect to the racialized history that applies to it. Minaj is using “Anaconda” to aggressively say back to those attempting to assimilate the booty for their own needs that they have no right, and that the ethnic female body is not a commodity or a product to be sold by the white mainstream that has denied it as an Other for so long. Minaj is resisting the assimilation of the black booty into mainstream as a de-contextualized product.

In other words…

I Luh Ya Worf.

Black-Ish: Do Black Creators have a Responsibility to Challenge Hegemonic Media?

“Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight! Matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!”

– Civil Rights Activist Thomas “TNT” Todd, as sampled by Public Enemy in Fight the Power

American pop culture and media has long been, and continues to be, saturated with grossly narrow representations of people of color. Mainstream media is perpetually controlled by the dominant culture within the United States, which has always been straight, white, and male. It is up to this group of people to produce content, which usually reinforces their values and creates images for consumption by mass audiences that shape a hegemony based on this one groups experiences and ideals. Because dominant groups tend to produce this content that so closely reflects themselves, when it comes to producing content representing people outside of the hegemony, there is an overwhelming failure to represent non-dominant-group people as anything other than stereotypes or underdeveloped characters whose purpose is to somehow reinforce the supremacy of the dominant hegemony. However, dominant hegemony will always produce the need for counter hegemonic culture, that attempts to undermine or challenge the values and the problematic image produced in the mainstream. These counter hegemonic images are usually on the fringes of the mainstream, being consumed by limited audiences, and discussing specific issues and problems that are seen largely in the mainstream as only relevant to those specific groups of people as opposed to issues facing us all. Rarely are counter hegemonic productions and creators allowed access into the mainstream, voicing opinions of marginalized groups to large audiences. The most current case of counter-hegemonic media being given mainstream distribution is the ABC show “Black-Ish”, which will soon be followed by “Fresh Off The Boat”, also on ABC, focusing on Asian Americans. The issue I want to raise here by analyzing “Black-Ish” is that what is happening with these shows is the illusion of truly giving voices to marginalized groups.  Instead of allowing for truly subversive content, the heads of production over at Disney/ABC are tapping into a need for counter-hegemonic media, which includes voicing some of the common struggles and problems faced by people of color as tools for comedic effect, while maintaining dominant values in the shows underlying themes and messages, thus continuing to silence the voices of the marginalized groups as serious concerns.

Black-Ish follows a trend started by the Cosby show of representing African Americans, and more specifically African American families, as intelligent, successful, and loving, as opposed to poor, or violent, or buffoons, in order to counter these images that saturated the media. When the Cosby show aired, the black families seen on TV were either in the Ghetto and needed white aid to get out, or had made it out of poverty but the fact they now co-mingled with rich or middle class white people was a punchline. Many images of African Americans still portrayed them as comedic buffoons on TV, re-presenting old images of minstrels or “Coons.” Cosby understood how harmful these images were and saw a necessity to provide images that suggested the opposite about African Americans to mainstream white audiences. The Cosby show was born out of the need for counter images, and was successful in that it created a legacy of shows that followed which shifted representations of blacks more toward Cosby-ish types instead of overtly racist stereotypes, at least until the mid to late 90’s where buffoonish characters started to reappear. The Cosby show also had the negative effect however, of creating the trend of what Sut Jhally calls “enlightened racism.” The images that the Cosby show and its successors produced started to turn into those of the “exceptional” blacks, who were nice and familiar, and most importantly non-threatening to whites. The images also started to form sentiments, to be internalized by both whites and some African Americans as well, that blacks who didn’t make it only had themselves to blame, despite the race and class issues that existed during the times. Heavy focus on the Huxtables’ (Cosby’s family) as the ideal black family framed any Black family who didn’t fit into their high class way of life as failures. During a time where the Reagan conservative political atmosphere and philosophy of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was hitting its peak, the Cosby show justified individualistic sentiments, ignoring societal inequalities. What was created by the Cosby show was a Catch-22 where positive representations of African Americans were needed, however they came at the cost of blaming non Cosby-ish African Americans for their own struggle, and ignoring the need for an overhaul of widespread institutional racism.

Fast forward a few decades and the need for positive images to fight the negative ones has become the need for diverse images to provide a full spectrum of representations of marginalized groups who are still reduced to certain stereotypes in the media. ABC has decided to return to the form that the Cosby show initiated using the backdrop of an upper/middle class familiar Black family to pose the question “What does it mean to be Black in America today?” However, they do not present a wide variety of Black characters from diverse backgrounds and cultures, the way that someone like Spike Lee did in Do the Right Thing when posing the same question in the 1989, and they do not address hard contemporary issues of racism, while instead framing the concerns of a father trying to preserve African American history and culture within his family as a comedic lost cause. The pilot of Black-Ish, while attempting to ask the question of what it means to be black, instead asks “What are you willing to give up to be American?”

So much of the pilot episode focused on being American and living the American dream, while simultaneously having almost every family member be an antagonist in the Dad’s mission to preserve black culture in his family. Outside of the domestic setting, the Dad had to put up with racism in the workplace (which was of comedic value for the show, of course), culminating in his conditional promotion that only got him advanced because he was black, which he was angry about but eventually accepted. The entire resolution of every issue in the episode was that even though he couldn’t change or preserve anything he set out to, it was just better to accept the racism and loss of black culture in the next generation, because really, we’re just all Americans. The end goal of “Black-Ish” was to latch on to the need for positive and diverse representations, and use the Cosby upper-class familiar black family platform to deliver a message of assimilation as a key to success. Interesting fun fact, this is similar to the way that Cosby, along with Sydney Poitier, latched on at the tail end of the trend of Blaxploitation films with “A Piece of the Action” in order to sneak in the message of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and to just stop blaming everyone else for your troubles.

What makes Black-Ish most significant though, is that opposed to a show being produced by members of dominant white culture, it seems to be in the hands of Black writers and producers, two of which are stars on the show. Anthony Anderson and Laurence Fishburne both hold leading roles and are credited as producers. This means that they have the rare opportunity to give black voices that may not share dominant culture’s ideals a chance to be heard in the mainstream. The barrier that still exists here though is that the show must be marketable to mainstream audiences, which may create compromises between dealing with hard issues of inequality and racism, and keeping things light as to not offend viewers who just want to sit down and have a 30 minute laugh. So the questions that arise for me is how much are the creators able to fight the power within Black-ish, and should they even be expected to when white creators aren’t held to the same standards? White people aren’t expected to make “white” shows, so why should black creators be expected to make “black” shows?

I don’t believe I have an answer.

If a content producer of color has been granted the privilege of a voice on mainstream television, they should not have to be forced to use their voice to fight at risk of being labeled as someone who has betrayed their people, or made a switch. The primary goal of anyone in mainstream media is to make money for whatever company is allowing their production to exist. This isn’t going to change, and it’s unrealistic to believe that every content producer should be producing something that deals with hard issues or attempts to shift the dominant ideology. However, if a show like Black-Ish is going to directly address issues of race in the dialogue and plot, which is something that Cosby Show tended to gloss over or avoid completely, they are taking a responsibility upon themselves to use their story to make substantial shifts, as opposed to saying things that people want to hear, only to reach an endpoint that repeats the same old assimilation messages that negate any of the struggles that had been voiced before. So possibly the answer to my question, is that creators should be held to a higher standard when they make it a point to explicitly address race in their mainstream program, otherwise I believe that they are just co-opting social issues and current progressive mindsets in order to hide their compromising messages of assimilation. If a show is going to fight the power of dominant culture, they need to fight the power. Not play around with the idea of fighting the power, only to decide that life is easier when you just give in to the power. “Black-Ish” doesn’t end up fighting any mainstream ideals despite bringing up issues of race and inequality, and decides that in the end, despite all of these past struggles that have shaped current social/political/economic statuses and are maybe probably definitely worth talking about, we’re all just American’s trying to live the American dream, and that’s what matters.